Windows 10: Update 1803 failed - leaves laptop machine unusable

Success!! I am writing this from my newly restored PC.

Method #2 finally worked. The problem was, the Windows Media Installation tool is apparently a fragile thing. Even though it says something like "verifying download", the download was for me corrupt the first two times. Today I downloaded it again onto three different drives. Finally, one of them worked.

But the new Win 10 installation lost all of my personal files. Thankfully, I had hired a data recovery service earlier, so I didn't lose any data.

The total bill for this adventure was,

  $499 ... Data Recovery Service

  $57.89 ... 1 TB USB drive for Data Recovery

  $300 ... 12 hours of my time (cheap @$25/hr) 

  $99 ... lost use of the computer for 33 days

  $955.89 TOTAL - THANKS, MICROSOFT!!

Thanks, Microsoft. Your screwup cost this customer $556.89 direct cash, and nearly $1000 overall.

My suggestion for anyone who is trying Method #2 ... if it doesn't work the first time, use the tool to download Win-10 again, onto a different disk, and keep trying until it does.

Reinstalling with boot media won't lose any data files unless you format the drive. Of course, for some applications, it won't be possible to just reinstall the application and marry it back to the original data files even if you have them.

Success!! I am writing this from my newly restored PC.

Method #2 finally worked. The problem was, the Windows Media Installation tool is apparently a fragile thing. Even though it says something like "verifying download", the download was for me corrupt the first two times. Today I downloaded it again onto three different drives. Finally, one of them worked.

But the new Win 10 installation lost all of my personal files. Thankfully, I had hired a data recovery service earlier, so I didn't lose any data.

The total bill for this adventure was,

  $499 ... Data Recovery Service

  $57.89 ... 1 TB USB drive for Data Recovery

  $300 ... 12 hours of my time (cheap @$25/hr) 

  $99 ... lost use of the computer for 33 days

  $955.89 TOTAL - THANKS, MICROSOFT!!

Thanks, Microsoft. Your screwup cost this customer $556.89 direct cash, and nearly $1000 overall.

My suggestion for anyone who is trying Method #2 ... if it doesn't work the first time, use the tool to download Win-10 again, onto a different disk, and keep trying until it does.

Who pays for the costs and damages ?????

Thanks Microsoft Corporation

I finally found from all my research how to force it to give me a reset option (the listed one didn't do a thing).  All looked like everythig was going well.....chose to reset and save my data.  It reset alright.....but lost all pictures, docs, music!  MS Sucks!  I've spent unbelievable hours trying to find a decent program to recover these files. Nothing is working as it states it will......even paid $40 for Wondershare.  All it does is lock up on me and take like 3 days to 'try' to recover a handful of files.  Now I'm battling with them for a refund.  I know they think I'm crazy.  But this whole thing is MS's fault.  If money were no object I'd sue the pants off this organization.

Same problem, i updated and thet happened. I am not sure on what to do, can i get some help microsoft?

It seems there's no hard and fast rule with this problem. Sometime people have been able to access the Rollback function, and it's worked. If that works for you, fine - but it would probably be a good idea to temporarily uninstall any Antivirus product you have before trying the update again. If however you keep landing in the Diagnostic screen you see at the beginning of this post, and none of the options in there seem to work, then the only remedy is a clean install using boot media. Good news is that so long as you don't format the drive during the install, your data files will still be within the \windows.old.000 or \windows.old folders.